JULY/AUGUST 2003 75 Bekaert, Harvey, and Lundblad (BHL) are to be congratulated for producing another paper on equity market liberalizations in emerging markets, and it is a pleasure to discuss their work. Yet, there are three reasons why I may not be an impartial discussant: (i) Having devoted most of my fledgling career to the study of capital account liberalization in emerging markets, I am ...

There are two major theories about trade’s effect on the environment. The first, a win-lose scenario, posits that trade liberalization leads to economic growth, which, while increasing incomes, also results in an increasing scale of economic activity and, therefore, greater environmental degradation. This effect might also be compounded by a composition effect, in which countries specialize in ...

Despite the long tradition in economics of trade being seen as net welfareimproving, criticism of trade and hence trade liberalization policies has cropped up from time to time, especially as far as LDCs are concerned. Among the concerns of trade liberalization from the LDC perspective were fears of terms of trade deterioration for primary exporters, the harmful effect of dependence on allegedl...

BACKGROUND Trade liberalization is promoted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) through a complex architecture of binding trade agreements. This type of trade, however, has the potential to modify the upstream and proximate determinants of tuberculosis (TB) infection. We aimed to analyse the association between trade liberalization and TB incidence in 22 high-burden TB countries between 1990 ...

the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of financial liberalization on exchange rate volatilities of the selected developing countries, which are now known as liberalizing countries. thus we test the hypothesis in which financial liberalization effect exchange rate volatilities in 43 selected developing countries during 1996-2005. accordingly, a regression model of exchange rate vol...

This paper surveys recent evidence suggesting that market-oriented institutions and policies are strongly related to economic growth, focusing on studies using the economic freedom indicator of the Fraser Institute. This index is critically discussed. Also various serious shortcomings of empirical studies using this index are identified. Nevertheless there are strong indications that liberaliza...

Improvements in economic efficiency and productivity are the most important sources for economic growth, however, have yet to occur in Russia. The Soviet Union left an institutional vacuum and large economic distortions behind, which set the stage for an established elite to systematically exploit factors of production for their personal benefit lacking the incentives to restructure. This paper...